Month: March 2008

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Old Dreams

Dreams. Everyone’s got ’em.

There are two links in that opening sentence, to kStyle’s and Blue Girl’s recent, colorful dreams. I recommend you follow and read (also, don’t miss Ann’s truly wacky dream in her comment on kStyle’s post.)

I’ve related dreams on this blog before, here and here, but the ones I’m about to tell were in an email that I sent in November of 2000, before George II’s inauguration and almost a year before terrorists used airliners to attack New York and Washington. I thought I had blogged them, and I spent quite a while searching revision99 for them before I tried my old emails. Then I thought “Since they’ve never been blogged, here’s a cheap post!” One weird note: In my current guitar setup, I actually now use a Category 5 cable with RJ-45 connectors, something I knew nothing about when I dreamed these dreams.

And now without further delay, I give you My Old Dreams.

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Last night I had two dreams. In one I was a terrorist. I don’t know what my Cause was, but my terrorist cell had purchased a used jetliner. I had outfitted it with a huge bomb and remote controls. Our plan was to fly by remote control, intercept a real jetliner, collide and destroy both planes in a gigantic, attention-getting midair explosion. Instead, our plane went out and over Catalina Island and crashed harmlessly in the ocean, without even exploding. Still the FBI came to my school, looking for the perpetrators. I was a student at this boarding school, and the authorities had zeroed in on a person or persons there. They had to interview everyone, but their interviews were unconventional: They looked deeply into our eyes searching for signs of a deceptive spirit; they hugged us tightly to see if we trembled; they smelled our breath for traces of plastique. Gradually they sent most of the students home, all but me and a few others. They weren’t sure if they were on the right track, and they were just doing their jobs, so they weren’t mean or anything. They just kept probing in various ways to see if one of us had done it. Even though they hadn’t fingered me, I was terrified that they would find me out. Me, the terrorist, terrified.

In my other dream I was in a rock band. We didn’t know very many songs, but somehow we had gotten booked at some event, I don’t know what, and I was stalling for time, not wanting to start playing, because then we would be found out. It was unreal, because the lights were on. In real life rock bands have to set up in the dark. I was moving my amplifier around, acting like I was trying to get it in just the proper location for good sound, knowing that once we started playing we would soon run out of material and our performance would necessarily end long before the scheduled time. When I finally got my amp set up I couldn’t find a cable I needed, because it was a Category 5 cable with RJ-45 connectors on it, just like the one you’d use to connect a DSL modem to the network card in a computer. Of course this kind of cable is not necessary for rock guitar players to hook up their amps, so I was being devious in my dream.

I might have been caught for rigging the jet, or embarrassed for being inadequate on stage. I don’t know, because, of course, I woke up.

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PS: While I’m talking about dreams, Commie Girl Rebecca Schoenkopf had a doozy a few weeks ago. But she never reads here, so she gets to be in the postscrpt. Take that, Commie Girl!

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Knowing Claudia

I went with a porn star to an afternoon party at the home of a famous English musician.

He lived in the hills between Los Angeles and the big valley to the north. Before they built the freeways, the San Diego and the Hollywood, you’d have to drive one of several narrow winding two-lanes to get from the big city out to the orange groves of the San Fernando Valley. The roads followed gullies we called “canyons.” These days the wealthy and the hip live in the hills off these roads, in splendid stoned isolation.

Claudia Skye took me with her to the party. She was invited because she was a beautiful porn star. I was brought along because I was her temporary amusement. Neither of us knew the English musician, and when we were introduced I tried to scare him away from Claudia. At the party, we admired the view off the deck, and we drank champagne and snorted cocaine.

Claudia was in town for the annual adult film awards banquet, and a few days earlier we’d had the cutest of meets. I was still intoxicated by her, and I didn’t know how fast things were unraveling.

She’d had a rough childhood, the kind it would not be gentlemanly of me to describe. Anyway, all I know is what she told me, and I have no way of telling if any of it was literally true. But the stories were strange and specific enough that I knew some crazy shit had happened. I wanted to shelter her from anything more, any fear, any attack. I wanted to know her mind, and teach her what I thought I knew of the beauty of the world. And I wanted us to fuck our brains out.

She was older than the other women at the party. Too old, she would say, to be a porn star. To me, those extra few years made her more beautiful. She had a mysterious way of seeming innocent and knowing at the same time. The young girls who make porno movies have seen it all, done most of it themselves, and the things that shock the community are old hat to them. But at a party when the camera is not rolling they are just little girls. Exotic, painted things, but uncertain and unknowing.

Claudia Skye was different. She’d had a life before. Real fights, real devils, real jobs, ordinary paychecks. This world of drugs and sex and breathtaking views, she could take it or leave it.

I wanted to leave. We couldn’t talk there, with the music and the mirrors and the friends we didn’t know. We drove along Mulholland in the faded early evening, and talked, almost like lovers.

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The Garbage Dilemma

All my life I’ve saved stuff and reused it.
Trash

From cars all the way down to rubber bands. I’ve owned numerous cars but only one of them was purchased new. All the rest were second hand, recycled from someone else’s life. I still pull the rubber bands off the throwaway newspapers that land in my front yard and put them on the doorknob. When it gets hot and there are a lot of rubber bands on the doorknob, the rubber bands kind of half-melt and get sticky. They gunk up the doorknob so when you go to open the door you think you’ve just grabbed a handful of something awful, which, in fact, you have. But I figure, why buy rubber bands when people deliver them free to your front yard? I’ve never been without a rubber band when I needed one. Not ever.

When I was a young man I bought second hand clothes at thrift stores. I saved money doing that, and I developed my Who cares what you think of my fashion sense attitude, which has served me well. Instead of trying to be stylish I just wear what I want. It gives me a sense of freedom, not having to figure out what’s hip. Of course, there was a time in the sixties when it was hip to wear old clothes, so for a little while there I was cool. But I’ve been around long enough to know that fashion just goes around in circles anyway, and if you keep something in your closet long enough it’ll come back in style.

I do keep things in my closet. A lot of it should be discarded, but I’ve become sentimentally attached to it. I keep things so long that they can’t even be donated to thrift stores, because they’re too shabby. But when I’m walking out to the trash can in the alley, a bag of trashy old clothes in hand, I think I can hear them sobbing, begging for a reprieve, desperate to avoid the landfill. Half the time I turn around and bring them back in the house. This is a sickness, I know. I need help. Somebody help me.

I also need help with old computers, and old computer parts. I started tearing apart and building PC’s 20 years ago. I’d upgrade some component, say, the video card, and then I’d end up with a spare video card, perfectly usable, just not by me. I’d try to find someone who needed one, and failing that I’d put the thing in a box, alongside the 300 baud modem. You never can tell when stuff like that will come in handy. Over the years my box filled up with ever more sophisticated components. At some point I started buying new components that I didn’t need, and putting them in the box. Now I have maybe ten boxes of this stuff. I discovered the rule that you have to get rid of old computer stuff within six months of decommissioning, or else it is hopelessly obsolete. I have suffered the humiliation of being turned down when I was trying to give away perfectly good, working computers, because they were obsolete. But these things contain toxic components. You can’t just put them in the landfills, with all their mercury and lead and battery acid, and who hasn’t seen the 60 Minutes expose about that village in China where all the “recycled” computers go, to be dismantled and sold by the pound by naive villagers who have no other means to support themselves and do the work with no hazmat protection? Best just keep the stuff in the garage.

For decades I have lined my kitchen trash can with plastic grocery bags. It seems proper: You go to the store and get food, carry it home in a plastic bag, open the cans or bags or boxes, prepare meals, then toss out the excess in the same bag you used to bring it into the house. Some people buy trash bags to line their kitchen trash cans. Presumably, they put their grocery store bags into the bags they bought, and throw them away. Why would you do that? Of course, over the years the quality of the free bags at grocery stores has declined. Recently they have been little more than a film of translucent plastic, nothing like the sturdy, built-to-last paper bag replacements they were originally. I had to adjust to these flimsy pieces of crap, but with care I was able to make them work as trash bags.

But now everybody’s all green and the stores are saying they don’t want to use any plastic bags at all anymore. This started with the health food stores first, then spread to places like Trader Joe’s, who actually would prefer if you brought your own bags with you. Then health food supermarkets, like Wild Oats and Whole Foods picked up the idea, and now the regular supermarkets are in on it, too. At first it was kind of like “paper or plastic?” But the evolution has gone rapidly all the way to “we don’t have any bags at all, sucker.” I guess I could get some of these biodegradable trash bags made out of starch, but I kind of like the old groceries in – garbage out symmetry.

Growing up I remember there was always something like a milk carton near the kitchen sink, or an old coffee can, where we put wet garbage. We didn’t always have a garbage disposal, and even if we did, there are some things you can’t put in there, but if you put those things in the paper-lined garbage can in the kitchen, you’d have a slimy mess on the floor as soon as you lifted that bag to take it out. So, as my plastic bag supply dwindled dangerously low, I got a coffee can (from my saved collection in the garage, natch) and put it next to the sink. To make it more or less reusable, I lined it with a small plastic produce bag — they’re still giving those out at markets. Now we put little stuff in the garbage disposal, dry trash in the trash can, and icky wet other stuff in the coffee can, and I take out the kitchen trash every two or three days instead of every day, to save on plastic bags.

This is a big pain in the butt. I’m probably going to start buying trash bags, brand new. It’s wrong, but what else can I do?

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Pants Afire

The President of the United States seems to be a complete asshole.

I’ve been in a state of humiliation since the “election” of 2000, or at least since I got over the disbelief and rage. I can say from first-hand knowledge that this has been easily the worst seven years the U.S. has endured since the middle of the 20th century. Sorry, I can’t speak first-hand about stuff before the midpoint. The Great Depression was probably a pretty rough time, but at least for most of it there was not an idiot at the top of the government.

Yes, George W. Bush is an idiot. Worse, he is under the control of a cabal of ultra right-wing ideologues who have no clue how to run things, or maybe they just don’t give a shit about justice or morality, as long as they get theirs, which they most assuredly are. Since I live here and people around the world have no reason not to believe that I am OK with his presidency, I am humiliated.

Except every now and then the rage comes out again.

I don’t usually do this, but here’s an entire op-ed from today’s (March 16, 2008) New York Times. I know no one ever follows my links, so I’m putting the whole thing here. It’s short and easy to read, so you should read it, especially if you are one of those who think Bush is a president kind of like other presidents, that he’s good at some things, not so good at others, that he’s essentially an honest man with the best interest of the nation and the people at heart, that he makes sensible decisions that intelligent people might disagree with, but they’re still sensible. Here you go:

Through Bush-Colored Glasses

Published: March 16, 2008

President Bush admitted on Friday that times are tough. So much for the straight talk.

Mr. Bush went on to paint a false picture of the economy. He dismissed virtually every proposal Congress is working on to alleviate the mortgage crisis, sticking to his administration’s inadequate ideas. And despite the rush of serious problems — frozen credit markets, millions of impending mortgage defaults, solvency issues at banks, a plunging dollar — he said that a major source of uncertainty today is whether his tax cuts, scheduled to expire in 2010, would be extended.

This was too far afield of reality to be dismissed as simple cheerleading. It points to the pressing need for a coherent plan to steer through what some economists are now predicting could be a severe downturn. Mr. Bush’s denial of the economic truth underscores the need for Congress to push forward with solutions to the mortgage crisis especially bankruptcy reform to help defaulting homeowners. Lawmakers also must prepare to execute, in case it is needed, a government rescue of people whose homes are now worth less than they borrowed to buy them.

Mr. Bush said he was optimistic because the economy’s foundation is solid as measured by employment, wages, productivity, exports and the federal deficit. He was wrong on every count. On some, he has been wrong for quite a while.

Mr. Bush boasted about 52 consecutive months of job growth during his presidency. What matters is the magnitude of growth, not ticks on a calendar. The economic expansion under Mr. Bush which it is safe to assume is now over produced job growth of 4.2 percent. That is the worst performance over a business cycle since the government started keeping track in 1945.

Mr. Bush also talked approvingly of the recent unemployment rate of 4.8 percent. A low rate is good news when it indicates a robust job market. The unemployment rate ticked down last month because hundreds of thousands of people dropped out of the work force altogether. Worse, long-term unemployment, of six months or more, hit 17.5 percent. We’d expect that in the depths of a recession. It is unprecedented at the onset of one.

Mr. Bush was wrong to say wages are rising. On Friday morning, the day he spoke, the government reported that wages failed to outpace inflation in February, for the fifth straight month. Productivity growth has also weakened markedly in the past two years, a harbinger of a lower overall standard of living for Americans.

Exports have surged of late, but largely on the back of a falling dollar. The weaker dollar makes American exports cheaper, but it also pushes up oil prices. Potentially far more serious, a weakening dollar also reduces the Federal Reserve’s flexibility to steady the economy.

Finally, Mr. Bush’s focus on the size of the federal budget deficit ignores that annual government borrowing comes on top of existing debt. Publicly held federal debt will be up by a stunning 76 percent by the end of his presidency. Paying back the money means less to spend on everything else for a very long time.

The fiscal stimulus passed by Congress, and touted by Mr. Bush on Friday, could juice growth for a quarter or two later this year. But the economy’s fundamental weaknesses indicate that Americans are ill-prepared for hard times. That makes the need for clear-eyed policies all the more urgent. We need them from the president, Congress and the contenders for the White House.

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You can read this for yourself at the Times’ web site. They no longer charge for any of their content. It’s a great paper. They have made some mistakes, but let me know if you know someone who hasn’t. Mainly, they hold their fire until they’ve got the facts. They give you the benefit of the doubt.

There is no more doubt about George W. Bush. He’s either a liar or a boob, or both. I hope there’s something left to govern when his successor is sworn in next January.

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It’s The Supreme Court, Stupid!

If you are a Democrat or a progressive independent voter, or a liberal of any kind, it’s time to ask yourself what that means.

Future Supreme Court

Barack Obama won the Mississippi primary today, and there will be a six week break before the next primary, a big one: Pennsylvania. Please, may Clinton and Obama cool their campaign rhetoric, especially the slurs and smears, for a while. This sniping is really getting to me, and I suspect many other voters feel the same.

The Dems are reinvigorated this season, and passions are running high. We had — what? — eight well-qualified candidates going in to this election. And a Republican party in disarray and obviously clueless as to how to run the country. How could we lose? I don’t think there’s been so much energy on the Democratic side since 1972, when George McGovern cranked up his populist anti-war campaign. All the young people woke up from their love-ins in surprise to find an old fart actually speaking the truth! You had to be there, but trust me: it was thrilling.

The passion looks different this time. I have talked to a lot of voters who are saying if their guy (or gal) doesn’t win the nomination, they are going to stay home on election day in November. Or vote for McCain. They are so powerfully invested in Obama or Clinton that if they don’t get their way, they are going to do something to give us President McCain, which will be sort of like another term of President Bush.

Naturally, no one person can actually accomplish this, and my data is admittedly anecdotal, but come on, people! I’m shocked how often I am hearing this kind of talk, and how vehemently these feelings are expressed, and how incredibly horrible it would be if enough of us carried out these threats and the Democrats failed to retake the White House this year. I don’t want anyone reading this to be offended — I don’t mean this as a personal insult, but I cannot stress enough the importance of getting a forward-thinking President in office AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

It’s the Supreme Court, Stupid!

Think about it. Presidents, congresspeople and senators can be voted out of office if they are doing stuff the voters don’t approve of. The justices are appointed for life. The court is currently teetering on the 5-4 brink of going all the way to Right-Wing World, which could have disastrous effects on reproductive rights, civil rights, freedom from religion and the balance of power in the federal government.

For most of you reading this, understand: The next President will have one, maybe two, maybe even three Supreme Court appointments. The Court can either be rebalanced through the appointment of moderate legal scholars or packed with “strict constructionists” who will always vote with the right-wing religious fundamentalists, and they will be there your whole life.

We stayed home in 2000. We said we didn’t like either candidate. Al Gore just wasn’t exciting enough. Some even said that both parties and both candidates were sides of the same coin, not enough difference to even think about. As a result we now have Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito. Do you really want to take your ball and go home this November, and let McCain get the opportunity to appoint a few young, ultraconservative justices?

This is too important to mess around with. Clinton and Obama are both light years better than McCain. Either of them will be a breath of fresh air after the past eight years. They can’t both win the nomination, and they will not be on the ticket together (get over that). Even if you have come to hate your candidate’s rival, I urge you to bite the bullet and support the eventual nominee.

Please, there is too much at stake to do anything else.

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Stop The Drama

I’m getting tired of this Democratic nominating campaign.

I mean, I was playing my guitar during coverage of this most recent “Super Tuesday,” the Texas/Ohio/Vermont/Rhode Island primaries. I didn’t sit glued to the TV screen as I have in all the earlier Super Tuesdays and Saturdays, eagerly awaiting the incoming results. In fact, I barely paid attention to them. I just picked up the news at the end, when most precinct totals were in and the results were final.

Except nothing’s final yet for the Democrats.

John McCain has already started trashing Senators Clinton and Obama, and at the same time kissing up pandering whoring himself smoothing over relations with the radical right end of his party, and by the time of the Republican convention they’ll be ready for the usual coronation. With no doubt about the outcome, the money from contributors will be flooding into the war chest and the “real” presidential campaign will have been going on for months.

But the Democrats are still slugging it out, beating each other up, giving the Republicans a bunch of excellent sound bites to use in their eventual (dirty) campaign against whoever wins the nomination. They’ve got two big states, Michigan and Florida, who broke the DNC rules and held their primaries too early. The DNC doesn’t want to seat those delegates, who are mostly pledged to Clinton. Clinton is saying it wouldn’t be fair to “disenfranchise” those voters. Obama is saying it wouldn’t be fair to let those states willfully break the rules and not bear the established consequences.

Clinton probably can’t catch Obama in pledged delegates. She’d have to win landslides in all the remaining primaries, which is so not likely. But Obama probably can’t get the required majority of pledged delegates to lock up the nomination before the convention. This is the point where they will go negative. Jones’ Law states “Bullies always win.” A corollary is that negative campaigning is more effective than positive campaigning. In plain English, you get more people to vote for you by calling the other guy names and demeaning his abilities, integrity and experience than by laying out your own thoughtful master plan for a peaceful, just world led by you. Since Clinton is behind, she’ll be the one slinging the mud. Obama might sling some back. Whoever “wins,” the GOP will have a lot of ammunition to use against him/her in the general.

If the delegate totals are close by convention time, I expect Clinton to try lobbying or pressuring the superdelegates to flip the outcome and give her the nomination. If this works, it will piss off the electorate and make a bunch of liberal voters stay home in November. When people don’t vote, Republicans high-five each other.

Why does this have to happen? I thought this election would be a cruise, given the metric buttload of great candidates the Dems had and the horrible, horrible record the Republicans have built in the past decade. (They’re still at it, by the way, this time screwing themselves and their contributors, ha ha.) I still think the Democrats will retake the White House and increase their majorities in Congress, but damn, they are making it hard for themselves.

Now that my guy is out of the race, I’m trying hard to remain neutral about which Democrat gets to be president. Truthfully, I can live with either one. But if the primary campaign gets ugly (uglier, by some lights), I will be disheartened, and so will a lot of other voters.

I won’t go into the litany of damage the Bush Administration has perpetrated — that will take an entire series of long posts. But in order to start cleaning up the mess the nation needs unity, resolve and participation. To this end, somebody in this campaign needs to make the hard choice to drop out and enthusiastically throw support to the winner, so we can right now eliminate the possibility of a third Bush term.

I don’t need any more drama, do you?

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Blessings

Overall, I’m a pretty lucky guy.

Jones RocksI seem to be healthy. I say “seem to be” because I don’t go to doctors unless I break a bone, which hasn’t happened in ten years, so I don’t have a professional evaluation of my health. I just know that a lot of my friends are sick or on medication or have had emergency surgery. I have aches and pains, but nothing compared to what my peers are going through.

I’ve complained a lot in this blog about my crummy job, and it is pretty crummy. But at least I have a job, and as annoying as it may be to get up and go make someone else rich five days a week, I’m really glad I’m not yet among the unemployed. I have a steady paycheck and a few side benefits at a time when most of the money in the United States is being reallocated to the extremely wealthy, the middle class is being converted into The Working Poor, and those working poor are becoming, simply, the poor. This hasn’t happened because I am a highly motivated self-starter: I understand it’s just luck. Because of the random way I have lived my life, I’ll probably need this job until about five years after my death. I know they’ll fire me before then, but for now — still got it.

My marriage has held up for nearly three decades. There’s been good times and bad, but we’ve gotten over. I have to say that it was me who caused the bad times and it was the patience and love and good humor of Mrs. Jones that got us through them. Once again, lucky: I had lots of chances to hook up with women who would have provided a lot more drama, and I might be on my fourth wife by now, or just a bitter bachelor. Instead, Mrs. J. and I found each other.

And even at my age, I get to play in a rock band! What I’m doing these days isn’t exactly the way I’d pictured my musical career ending, but still, there’s nothing quite like the exhilaration of playing rock’n’roll for a live audience, getting them on your side, moving them, and getting your rocks off at the same time. Even the rehearsals are uplifting. For example, I started today lethargic and with a nagging pain in my lower back, and after jamming for three hours I felt invigorated and ready for more. And that’s not to mention hauling a ton of equipment, setting it up, breaking it down and hauling it back again. It may be luck that I’m able to do this, that I have the ability to play my instrument and convince other guys to want to play with me. It may be luck, but I hope it’s more than that, that it’s related a little to my own hard work. But whatever — I still get to play in a rock band!

I’ll get back to the whining soon, of course. I just wanted to remind myself of these things.

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